Paul Chong                                     Thursday, 2 February 2017

Jing-Jin-Ji
(Short name for Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei. Ji is a one-character abbreviation often used for Hebei province.)

The name Jing-Jin-Ji has a definite crystal ring to the name of Xi Jinping.
A megapolistic dream of President Xi Jinping.
Jing-Jin-Ji: Birth of a megalopolis with Chinese characteristics.A mega project unparalleled in human history.

• the size of New England
• the largest megacity in human history
• Northeast China will soon be home to a massive regional hub with a population five times that of the New York metropolitan area.
• an area of 82,000 sq miles larger than 100 US cities combined
• 130 million population when completed, some 10% of China’s one billion-plus people. Currently, it’s 110 million combined.

Hebei, a poorer, steel-producing province roughly the size of Oklahoma. Tianjin was connected to the capital Beijing via a high-speed train in 2008 that covers the 130-kilometer (80-mile) distance in a mere 30 minutes.

Integration of the areas will spur more development as well as help to relieve Beijing’s belching smog, sprawling traffic jams and notoriously long commutes—which in some cases stretch to as long as three hours.

Though Beijing and Tianjin officials have stayed tight-lipped on plans, Hebei stirred the pot recently when the provincial government announced on its website (in Chinese) that the city of Baoding (150 kilometers from Beijing) was preparing to take on some of Beijing’s administrative functions, without offering specifics. But it’s already causing real estate prices to soar. It’s actually three very large cities that are being forced to merge together to, bizarrely, reduce the size of one of them: Beijing.
The new city should unite Beijing, Tianjin and the Hebei region into one supercity.

*Beijing will become more on political, cultural and high tech industries, the high end functions.

*The Port of Tianjin, which is one of the busiest ports in the world, vying to become the financial heart of China’s northeast.

*Hebei will have heavy industries, and the relocation of   ‘non-capital functions’.

China has committed $36 billion to further build high-speed rail connection . . . to improve transport links between Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei.
Getting around Jing-Jin-Ji speedily will be ensured.
This colossal infrastructure building endeavor will include of a total of nine projects that will consist of 1,100 kilometers of new track being laid by 2020.
integration will allow entire regions of cities to function as singular urban organisms that can be better administered, planned, and economically developed.

The frameworks that China’s megaregions are being built upon are the enhanced transportation grids that run through them, which often consist of new high-speed and conventional rail lines, metro systems, light rail, and highways that allow people and goods to travel from one city to another as though they were all part of the same urban entity. There will still be significant amounts of green space and rural areas within these city clusters.

# In addition to Jing-Jin-Ji, China is currently building around nine other such megacity clusters across the country, which include one consisting of 16 cities and 80 million people in Yangtze River Delta and another which draws together 11 cities another 48 million people in the Pearl River Delta.